From the archives: This criminal was never brought to justice ~ rŌbert

Declassified White House Records Show How Nixon-Kissinger Set Strategy of Destabilization—And Why

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As Door Opens for Legal Actions in Chilean Coup, Kissinger Is Numbered Among the Hunted ~ NYT

By Larry Rohter

March 28, 2002

With a trial of Gen. Augusto Pinochet increasingly unlikely here, victims of the Chilean military’s 17-year dictatorship are now pressing legal actions in both Chilean and American courts against Henry A. Kissinger and other Nixon administration officials who supported plots to overthrow Salvador Allende Gossens, the Socialist president, in the early 1970’s.

In perhaps the most prominent of the cases, an investigating judge here has formally asked Mr. Kissinger, a former national security adviser and secretary of state, and Nathaniel Davis, the American ambassador to Chile at the time, to respond to questions about the killing of an American citizen, Charles Horman, after the deadly military coup that brought General Pinochet to power on Sept. 11, 1973.

General Pinochet, now 85, ruled Chile until 1990. He was arrested in London in 1998 on a Spanish warrant charging him with human rights violations. After 16 months in custody, General Pinochet was released by Britain because of his declining health. Although he was arrested in Santiago in 2000, he was ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial.

The death of Mr. Horman, a filmmaker and journalist, was the subject of the 1982 movie ”Missing.” A civil suit that his widow, Joyce Horman, filed in the United States was withdrawn after she could not obtain access to relevant American government documents. But the initiation of legal action here against General Pinochet and the declassification of some American documents led her to file a new suit here 15 months ago.

Last fall, after gaining approval from Chile’s Supreme Court, Judge Juan Guzmán, who is also handling the Pinochet case, submitted 17 questions in the Horman case to American authorities. An American Embassy official here confirmed that the document, known as a letter rogatory, has been received in Washington, but said it has not yet been answered and that he did not know if or when there would be a response.

”We’re pressing the case in Chile because this is the first opportunity we have had to see if there is still some real evidence there,” Mrs. Horman said by telephone from New York. ”But the letters rogatory seem to be in a paralyzed state.”

William Rogers, Mr. Kissinger’s lawyer, said in a letter that because the investigations in Chile and elsewhere related to Mr. Kissinger ”in his capacity as secretary of state,” the Department of State should respond to the issues that have been raised. He added that Mr. Kissinger is willing to ”contribute what he can from his memory of those distant events,” but did not say how or where that would occur.

Relatives of Gen. René Schneider, commander of the Chilean Armed Forces when he was assassinated in Oct. 1970 by other military officers, have taken a different approach than Mrs. Horman. Alleging summary execution, assault and civil rights violations, they filed a $3 million civil suit in Washington last fall against Mr. Kissinger, Richard M. Helms, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and other Nixon-era officials who, according to declassified United States documents, were involved in plotting a military coup to keep Mr. Allende from power.

In his books, Mr. Kissinger has acknowledged that he initially followed Mr. Nixon’s orders in Sept. 1970 to organize a coup, but he also says that he ordered the effort shut down a month later. The government documents, however, indicate that the C.I.A. continued to encourage a coup here and also provided money to military officers who had been jailed for General Schneider’s death.

”My father was neither for or against Allende, but a constitutionalist who believed that the winner of the election should take office,” René Schneider Jr. said. ”That made him an obstacle to Mr. Kissinger and the Nixon government, and so they conspired with generals here to carry out the attack on my father and to plot a coup attempt.”

In another action, human rights lawyers here have filed a criminal complaint against Mr. Kissinger and other American officials, accusing them of helping organize the covert regional program of political repression called Operation Condor. As part of that plan, right-wing military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay coordinated efforts throughout the 1970’s to kidnap and kill hundreds of their exiled political opponents.

Argentina has also begun an investigation into American support for and involvement in Operation Condor. A judge there, Rodolfo Cancioba Corral, has said he regards Mr. Kissinger as a potential ”defendant or suspect.” But lawyers say it is virtually impossible for a foreign court to compel former American officials to answer a summons.

During a visit by Mr. Kissinger to France last year, for instance, a judge there sent police officers to his Paris hotel to serve him with a request to answer questions about American involvement in the Chilean coup, in which French citizens also disappeared. But Mr. Kissinger refused to respond to the subpoena, referred the matter to the State Department, and flew on to Italy.

”I think it is clear that Kissinger is now one of many, many officials who have to think twice before they travel,” said Bruce Broomhall, director of the international justice program at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. ”It will be surprising to many that an American secretary of state is among that group, but times have certainly changed” as a result of the Pinochet case, he said.

The uproar appears to have forced Mr. Kissinger to cancel a trip to Brazil. He was scheduled to make a speech and receive a government medal in São Paulo on March 13, but withdrew after leftist groups there said they would demonstrate against him and also called on judges and prosecutors to detain him for questioning about Operation Condor.

A spokeswoman for Kissinger Associates in New York attributed the change of plans to a ”scheduling conflict.” But the organizer of the event, Rabbi Henry Sobel of the Congregacão Israelita Paulista, said ”the situation had become politically uncomfortable” both for Mr. Kissinger and local Jewish community leaders who had invited him.

”I spoke with him many times on the telephone and made it very clear to him what was happening behind the scenes, and he was very sensitive to that,” Rabbi Sobel said in a telephone interview. ”This was a way to avoid any problems or embarrassment for him and for us.”

The Decade That Cannot Be Deleted ~ NYT

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Alamy Photo

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By Pamela Paul

Opinion Columnist

It would seem impossible to forget or minimize the Cultural Revolution in China, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, resulted in an estimated 1.6 million to two million deaths and scarred a generation and its descendants. The movement, which under Mao Zedong’s leadership sought to purge Chinese society of all remaining non-Communist elements, upended nearly every hallowed institution and custom. Teachers and schools long held in esteem were denounced. Books were burned and banned, museums ransacked, private art collections destroyed. Intellectuals were tortured.

But in China, a country where information is often suppressed and history is constantly rewritten — witness recent government censorship of Covid research and the obscuring of Hong Kong’s British colonial past in new school textbooks — the memory of the Cultural Revolution risks being forgotten, sanitized and abused, to the detriment of the nation’s future.

The Chinese government has never been particularly eager to preserve the memory of that sordid decade. When I spent six weeks traveling in China in 1994 — a slightly more open time in the country — I encountered few public acknowledgments of the Cultural Revolution. Museum placards and catalogs often simply skipped a decade in their timelines or provided brief references in the passive voice along the lines of “historical events that took place.”

But in her new book, “Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution,” the journalist Tania Branigan notes that under Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, efforts to suppress this history have intensified — with troubling implications for the political health of the country at a time when it looms larger than ever on the world stage. “When you’ve had a collective trauma, you really need a collective response,” Branigan told me recently. “I can see why the Communist Party wants to avoid the rancor and bitterness, but when you don’t have that kind of acknowledgment, you can move on — but you can’t really recover.”

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Juan Mansfield, el otro lado … 5/12/23

5 a.m. quarter moon

rising ~

a new path

rŌbert (1948-?)

Juan followed his new path Friday

I didn’t know John for long, in years but knew him well as a person.

engaging, brilliant, a gentleman, a practicing Buddhist, an artist of the world

I liked him immensley

Yin/Yang ~

selfishly I go to the obvious of missing him, grieving …

then clarity ~ Hank Williams ‘three cords and the truth’

how fortunate to have someone like Juan in your life

the world was a better place with his energy

Thank you Juan

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Abrazos fuerte

rŌbert

Basho

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One of John’s old “Daily” missives about the impermanence of life …

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aaahhh

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Greene attempted to speak in a park outside the courthouse in downtown Manhattan. She was jostled and drowned out by whistles blown by counter-protesters.

“It was absolute chaos,” she told Tucker Carlson on Wednesday. “And that’s what the mayor of New York City wanted to happen to me.”

Georgia’s old Santa Fe casa up for sale if you’ve got an extra $15 million laying around

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We used to hang out and paint in the mornings then Georgia would head to the kitchen and rustle up some grub, usually pulled-pork. Sometimes we’d head over to Evanglos and swill a couple of Coors then get back to our afternoon sessions before a big dinner fiesta with her friends.. those were the days .. rŌbert

JACK MILLER ~ Sept. 2, 1938-March 1, 2022

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CLEAR LAKE-Jack Frederick Miller, 82, of Clear Lake, Florida died Saturday, December 25, 2021… oops, wrong story .. 

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Wednesday, March 9, 2022

E. Jack Miller, a man who loved high mountains and deep fjords, passed away on March 1 in a hospital in Montrose, Colorado, of injuries suffered in an auto accident the week before. He was 83.

Miller taught climbing in Yosemite, led wilderness trips for Mountain Travel in Berkeley, California, and ran an adventure travel company, Andean Outfitters. He made numerous first ascents in South America but held a special love for the icy terrain of southern Chile. He first visited Patagonia in 1974 and climbed many of the region’s wildest ranges.

Miller was born on September 2, 1938, in Spokane, Washington, where he grew up. He took to rock climbing with great enthusiasm but little money. “When we climbed in Mexico, we would buy cheap rope in the markets, he said, “and were very careful not to fall.”

Having honed his climbing skills in the Cascades and the California Sierra, he joined the Yosemite Mountaineering School under Wayne Merry of the first El Cap climbing team. Miller proved a popular teacher, combining concern for his students with a wry sense of humor. He nearly convinced one client that in case of starvation, the man could eat the large buttons on his parka.

Miller’s published a number of articles about his trips, including “Sea-going Climbers in Southern Chile” and “Towers of Wind and Ice: The Cordillera de Sarmiento of Southern Chile” in the American Alpine Journal, and “Chile’s Uncharted Cordillera de Sarmiento,” National Geographic, 1994.

Over the years, Miller’s climbing partners included Royal Robbins, Yvon Chouinard, and many others. Not all of them shared his enthusiasm for the windswept wilds of southern Chile. “We were rained on every day for forty days,” said journalist William Rodarmor, who joined Miller and his friend Peter Bruchhausen on an expedition out of Punta Arenas in 1974. “It was biblical.”

In 1979 Miller moved to a cabin he built on Hasting Mesa near Telluride. He continued to roam the local mountains with his dog Klondike, still planning one last trip to Patagonia.

A celebration of Jack Miller’s life will take place this spring on Hastings Mesa.

Read about the Sarmiento vacation

Jack out for his morning walk.

white board wisdom from Phoebe

AFTER HALF A CENTURY, ‘THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON’ STILL REVERBERATES ~ NYT

Pink Floyd’s enduring blockbuster merged grandeur and malaise. Very much a product of its era, it became one of the best-selling albums of all time.

A black-and-white photo from the early 1970s of four longhaired men standing in a row and looking at the camera with a mixture of seriousness and amusement.
From left: Nick Mason, David Gilmour, Roger Waters and Richard Wright of Pink Floyd. The group’s 1973 album, “The Dark Side of the Moon,” has had a long life on radio playlists and the Billboard chart.Credit…Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

By Jon Pareles

Feb. 28, 2023

Glum, ponderous songs about madness, mortality and greed, punctuated with tense instrumentals. Was that a blueprint for a blockbuster? It hardly sounds like the makings of one of the best-selling albums of all time.

But there’s no denying the popularity and tenacity of “The Dark Side of the Moon,” the indelible album that Pink Floyd released 50 years ago, on March 1, 1973. Looming like an inscrutable monolith, “Dark Side” spent nearly all of the next 14 years — through punk, disco, early hip-hop and the pop heyday of MTV — lodged in Billboard’s Top 200 album chart. It arrived during the analog, material days of record stores and vinyl LPs, when an album purchase was a commitment. And no matter how familiar “Dark Side” went on to become as an FM radio staple, people still wanted their own copy, or perhaps a new copy to replace a scratched-up one. In the digital era, “The Dark Side of the Moon” album returned to the charts on CD, selling and then streaming more millions.

The success of “Dark Side” stoked the ambitions of Pink Floyd and its leader, Roger Waters, who has toured arenas and stadiums ever since; Waters, 79, is playing his “first ever farewell” dates this year. He conceived the “The Wall,” a narrative rock opera released in 1979, that would foreground his anti-authority reflexes, from schoolmasters to heads of state; he has performed it against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall. Decades later, Waters would go on to spout cranky, conspiracy-theory-minded, pro-Russia political statements that many former fans abhorred. When “Dark Side” appeared, all that was far in the future.

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There will, of course, be another deluxe edition for the latest “Dark Side” anniversary. Arriving March 24, the new boxed set has high-resolution and surround-sound remixes and other extras, though it’s largely redundant after the exhaustive “Immersion Edition” reissue in 2011. Both “Immersion” and the new set include a worthy 1974 concert performance of “Dark Side,” with brawny live sound and extended onstage jams.

Waters has also announced his own full-length remake of “Dark Side,” that will have his own lead vocals — not the husky, doleful voice of Pink Floyd’s guitarist, David Gilmour — with Waters’s spoken words over the album’s instrumentals, along with “no rock ’n’ roll guitar solos.”

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